Category: essays

I have stumbled over a portion of the internet of which I had previously not known. It’s possible I might have been happier that way, but you can’t unring that bell.

There appears to be a small industry producing short videos or playlets in which one person is truly awful, and gets their comeuppance. Like a scripted version of an encounter filmed on someone’s phone, where (for example) a nasty person calls the cops to shut down a kids’ lemonade stand because it’s a “health code violation”. Of course the nasty person is a well-to-do white woman and the “violation” appears to be nothing more than that the kids are black and selling lemonade in her neighborhood. The nasty person is eventually scolded or arrested or otherwise trounced, and goodness and virtue triumph.

One “brand,” if you can call it that, focuses on the adventures of the Mango Park Police Department; they have their own YouTube channel, and many many videos. The hero, police captain James Porter  (and occasionally, confusingly, a Mango Park judge as well) is played by a black man (actor Verne Alexander) who exudes decency. The Captain’s frequent foil are women cursed by their features to play the “mean and self-righteous” role. There are other repertory players who appear in these things–sometimes as good guys, other times as villains. The playlets all have titles like “Boss Forced to Resign After Mistreating Black Employee,” or “Wealthy Entitled Karen Sues Cops, Does Not End Well.” The sins of the villains are overblown–this is not a subtle art form. The production values are somewhat below those of a 1970s Afterschool Special, with writing to match.

What fascinates me is that these playlets get hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, and many comments, most of which are of the “You rock, Captain Porter!” variety. Some of the audience seems to confuse Captain/Judge Porter with real world sometime-jurists like Judge Judy Sheindlin.  As I say, there are a lot of these: someone is making enough money doing this to finance these videos and to make more. But who is the audience? 

I was talking to my daughter about this phenomenon. She calls it “rage-bait,” but I’ve been thinking of it as “Karenporn,”* entertainment that sets up an easy target: an entitled, well-t0-do (usually female) white person who thinks that anything that crosses their personal squick line must be illegal; who expects the authorities and the world around her to laud her for taking a stand. And the satisfaction of these stories is that the Karen (or Chad, as I believe her male counterpart is called) gets smacked down hard. 

If you are a conservative of the MAGA stripe, maybe you think this is entertainment for liberals? I find it hard to believe that most of the liberals I know would watch more than one of these films without wincing. Because I wanted to write about them, I watched several, and felt oddly queasy–certainly not triumphant or entertained.

Maybe there’s just a portion of the electorate that hungers to see cartoon villainy get its comeuppance? If so, I recommend almost any of the the Marvel films–both the villainy and production values are more convincing.

__________
*with apologies to my several friends named Karen who do not deserve to have coals of fire heaped on them for the bad behavior of others.

Today I want to talk about reality. Something that appears and reappears in my historical research life is that we all think we are firmly linked to reality. That we know and understand clearly the difference between pure fiction and the stuff of our everyday.

I want to introduce you to the work of John Boyne, because it quite clearly proves that this is not always the case. Why is Boyne’s work more important than the words of a seven year old friend who recently explained unicorns to me? Because the friend and I have a clear understanding that we believe in unicorns only in certain contexts. We step sideways into a fictional reality and are perfectly agreed on when we should step back and accept that the unicorn in question is a stuffed toy. It is, in fact, the unicorn in question is the stuffed toy that was used to promote the Glasgow world science fiction convention in Australia for two years. More than one child has played with or borrowed it and understands its particular links to reality. One talked to it and made sounds to demonstrate that it was talking back. We held a three-way conversation and her mother was not at all worried that we had descended into a place where the rules of physics and the natural order we know did not hold.

My question is whether John Boyne has the same understanding? He might. If he does, then his work contains other problems. I’ll leave the other problems to you (I’ve had enough of antisemitism today – I’m Jewish and accusations are currently part of my real and ordinary life) and look solely at how Boyne works with the worlds he creates as a writer, and with history.

Let’s start with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. It’s read by children all over the world, and is the basis for many people’s view of the Holocaust. As fiction, this is a pain, but not in and of itself a problem. Boyne could keep it fictional quite easily by saying, “This is not built from our world. It is imaginary” and suggest that something else be prescribed reading on the Holocaust, something with a stronger basis in our reality. He could also rewrite Jewish characters so they were not cardboard cutouts. I feel like Pinocchio, wanting to be a real human being.

I have not seen him say his work is not our world. Instead, he wrote a sequel, which is at least as problematic as the first novel and is also recommended to me by people who want me to know more about the Holocaust. I ask them where my family is in the book and they cannot answer. I am still a wooden puppet. All my family in Europe in 1939, except for one teenager, died in Auschwitz. Ask me about it sometime. The story is nothing like Boyne’s novels.

If you want to understand where Boyne’s novels differ from actual history and lived experience and why not accepting them as fantasy or magical is a problem, this site is a good place to start:

https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/blog/the-problem-with-the-boy-in-the-striped-pyjamas/

Until the release of a third novel by Boyne, I didn’t realise that the problem was one with reality, nor that Boyne was such a lazy researcher. In A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, Boyne uses a recipe for dye that is genuine, because he researched it. He researched it in the same way that I researched the title of his novel, just a moment ago. He used the internet and a search engine. The recipe he came up with was from a game spun from the Legend of Zelda.

I’ve had to look up dyes, myself. I needed a Medieval recipe for a black dye for my forthcoming novel. I didn’t like what I read on the internet and I didn’t trust myself to interpret dying technique without advice, so me, I asked a textile archaeologist, Dr Katrin Kania. An email each way and I had my dye, suitable for exactly the right place and time. My dye may still contain errors, but those are errors of interpretation, not errors of existence.

This recipe had me thinking about how I could accept a well-written novel that has a bunch of problems, some ethical. My conclusion is pretty much what gave me my opening to this little piece. Boyne now represents to me a writer whose work claims historicity but is actually, like my own work, fantastical or science fiction. My work is more historically accurate than his in some places (for instance in my time travel novel) because, well, I’m an historian. The Old Occitan in Langue.doc 1305 is an indication that history is a base for my fiction. The Zelda recipe is an indication that fantasy is a base for his, while the apparent reality of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas suggests alternate history. A nicer Holocaust than the one Jews and Romani actually went through and mostly failed to survive. A Holocaust that didn’t murder children on arrival at an extermination camp and where young German boys weren’t part of Hitler’s youth, and where children could play by a barbed wire fence manned by guards who shot to kill.

This helps me understand some of the people who tell me day in and day out that they do not hate Jews: they live in a fantasy world, just like Boyne. Maybe even the same fantasy world as Boyne.

I did not mean to write anything sarcastic today, but it’s one of those days where body aches and antisemitism walk side by side. If I were to create an alternate reality from today, it would be more depressing than ours. It’s already been created, though, in various places, including in some of the stories in Other Covenants.

I wrote one of the hopeful and happy stories in that volume. I need to get back to that place, where I admit the bigotry and stupidity and that some people are lucky enough to live in a safer world. That’s the thing, Boyne’s fantasy world reflects his own sense of what the real world looks like, as do my fantasy worlds. In my real world, the fate of Australia’s Jews depends on our election on May 3. He lives in a world that’s quite terrifying for me, because he cannot see who he hurts with his writing and how. If he wants to contest that, I would like to see him assert a different sense of reality… by making the Zelda dye using the original ingredients*.

* You can find the recipe partway down the page here: Boy in the Striped Pyjamas writer accidentally includes Zelda recipe in new novel | Eurogamer.net

Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day. I’m not reminding you of this. I’m trying to work out how to read the news tomorrow. You see, our next Federal election is on May 3.

Australia has a very different election cycle to the US – we’ve only known about the coming election for a few days. We’ve known for a while that the last possible day for the election was May 17 and our elections are always on a Saturday. We also know that the preferred date for the election for the current government was mid-April but that the Queensland cyclone rudely intervened. Now Queenslanders are upset because the election is on their long weekend. Queensland’s vote is critical this time round, and so many people are arguing about how upset Queenslanders will vote.

We have an unpopular party currently in power (Labor, which is our liberal), an unpopular coalition not currently in power (Liberal/National, which is our right wing, with a leader who is often described as a mini-Trump or “Mr Potato Head”), and a bunch of unpopular minor parties, one of whom is the Greens. The Greens are spectacularly good at calling for a shared society while they promote antisemitism.

This is the messiest election I’ve seen in fifty years of election watching. It’s also going to decide the nature of Australia in a fundamental way. We have a silent majority, you see, and we have the compulsory vote: the silent majority will speak. None of us know enough about that silent majority. All the pollsters are discovering new ways of finding out. Today, for instance, we found out the most likely voting pattern for under 30s in cities.

What has this to do with April Fools’? It’s simple. In a mad-crazy election lead-up, all the major and minor parties are jabbering as if the world will end if they fall silent for even a second. Very little of what they say makes sense. At least on April Fools’ Day we know for certain not to believe what they promise.

This past week I braved the rigors of flying in America (spoiler: flights were thankfully uneventful) to go to Orlando, Florida for ICFA. That stands for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which is put on by IAFA (the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts). I have been going to ICFA for maybe a dozen years; it is one of my favorite conventions. A lot of that has to do with the writers and artists who attend, in addition to the academic professionals who come to deliver papers and be on panels. Possibly the most satisfactory programming–to me, anyway–is when you have academic and creative folk on a panel, sharing perspectives.

What kinds of things get talked about? Here are the titles of a handful of panels and discussions:

• The Haunted House is a Fruiting Body: Fungus in Moreno-Garcia and Kingfisher
• Devil’s In the Details: place and personhood in Horror
• Monstrous Adaptations, Translations and Appropriations
• A Wolf in the Fold: Werewolves in Modernity and Post-Modernity
• Accepting, Resisting, and Complicating the Zombie
• History is Written by…The Power of Alternative History in Fantasy

Plus, there are readings by the creative guests, and a performance of flash plays (disclaimer: I usually wind up performing in the flash plays. This year the plays were so flash they were one minute long, intermixed with improv. It was enormously fun). There are banquets and awards dinners which I usually don’t attend, and a ton of people to talk with.

Part of what I like about ICFA is that so much of the time my head is down and my attention is on my own paper, and I don’t think about what someone trained in reading and understanding text in a literary or philosophical sense might think of what I’m doing. And that’s a good thing: if I thought about that too much I very likely would not write anything ever again. But to see the kind of thoughtful critical treatment of fantastic literature that the participants at ICFA provide is heartening. I came up in a time when SF and fantasy were the decidedly junior members of the literary firm; that’s not the case any more.

Like most conventions, though, the very best time is sitting around the pool (Florida, right?) and talking with friends old and new, talking about writing and publishing and the world. Going out to dinner. Looking for the alligator who very occasionally used to waddle by the lake (I saw him once, years ago. Never since).

The convention runs Wednesday – Saturday night. Most participants leave on Sunday morning, but some of us stay an extra day and have an adventure: go to Gatorland or, as I did this year, head to the Blue Springs State Park to see manatees. There were so many manatees, and their calves! Apparently the local term for manatee is “floaty potato.” It is apt. I honestly wonder about the early European sailors who thought manatees were mermaids–that’s what a long time on a ship will do to your perception.

Anyway: ICFA. Highly recommended.

The world overtook me this week, but here’s a piece from the past.

When I was a kid and my family lived in New York City but spent weekends and holidays at the Barn, guests were a way of life. At the beginning, that meant that everyone stayed in the old farmhouse across the driveway which had come with the property. It was probably a late-Victorian vintage, but not the charming vintage. More the utilitarian-structure-built-by-people-with-no-taste vintage. Its lack of curb-appeal aside, it was a perfectly serviceable house with heat, water, and electricity. And walls. All of which, in the early days, the Barn lacked. So we, and our guests, would kip in the house, sometimes three or four to a room (kids on camp cots), then rise and go our Barnish way.

The house, as I’ve said, was ugly, but it was not without its interest. In the attic we found all manner of weird, dusty, flyspecked treasures: framed academic certificates awarded to people whose names were rendered in such tortured ornate penmanship as to be unreadable; huge old school maps, one of them so old that it predated the Gadsden Purchase (1854!), unwieldy ugly dressers and chairs. Unlike the Barn, the house was not a refuge for livestock, but there were–or had been at some earlier time–mice, and their nests. Downstairs there were three or four small bedrooms (the one I slept in had cabbage rose wallpaper which I, at five, thought the height of elegance). Below that, the kitchen (with coal burning stove!), living room, and dining room, where my parents’ old paperbacks and furniture went to die. I have a strong, visceral memory of those paperbacks, with their lurid covers (even Mill on the Floss was rendered shocking! by the art and copy) and musty smell. Those books, which had names like Keep the Aspidistra Flying, were yellowed and crumbling and seemed very exotic to me, may account for my early onset book-lust.

Until we got plumbing in the Barn, which involved dowsing and drilling and many exciting things, we carried water across the 200-odd feet from the house to the Barn, where the electric stove and refrigerators were almost the first things to go in. Picture a make-way-for-ducklings line of family members, each with his or her pot or pitcher of water for cooking or washing up. O! Pioneers! And of course, unless you were really committed to roughing it, you retired to the house for the private use of plumbing.

At night, the kids would be tucked into bed in the house; then the parents would retire across the driveway to the Barn for whatever revelry seemed good to them. My brother and I were used to this, but guest-kids often had a problem going to sleep in a strange house in a strange place with strange sounds outside, and would start crying. It fell to me, as the hostess and presiding child, to cross the pitch-dark lawn to the Barn and alert the parents that one of their offspring was freaking out.

The minute the Barn was at all habitable, we shifted our base of operations over there. This left a perfectly serviceable ugly farmhouse, abandoned for daily use. My brother and I used it for hide and seek; we were the only kids I knew who had a whole house to play house in. But as we got older those games palled, and the poor house was left to become colder and more empty, until my father declared it an eyesore. He’d never wanted the farmhouse. So he put an ad in the local Pennysaver: free house for anyone who would move it away. When he got no takers, he sweetened the deal: free house and a quarter acre of land to anyone who would move it away. That got someone’s attention: the house was raised up off its foundations, ready to be rolled away. Except the taker defaulted: he couldn’t afford to move the house. So now we had a house up on jacks, and it stayed there for months. Without foundations, the once sturdy house began to droop toward the middle, at which point, like a car with a sprung frame, it was declared a junker.

What to do with a dead house? In the end, Dad offered it to the local fire department, and they came over and had practice fires: light ‘er up, put ‘er out, light ‘er up, put ‘er out. What was left was ploughed into the foundation, and seeded over; within a remarkably short time there was lawn there, and you’d never have known there had been a house there. Those school certificates and the map without the Gadsden Purchase Dad gave to the local historical society, and then there was no trace of the house at all. It was all a little bit like a structural version of A Star is Born–with the upstart upstaging the old veteran. I still remember the smell of those books, and that cabbage rose wallpaper, though.